Producing Safe, I had an opportunity to watch Julianne Moore at work. In the role of a woman who felt as if her environment was attacking her, she lost twenty pounds, and she was thin to begin with. She walked around weak from hunger, and she began to acquire an almost luminous fragility. Seeing up close what truly great actors do to their bodies—and their minds—brings it home: Actors are not like other people. If they were, you wouldn’t want to sit and stare at them for hours—to read their inflections, ogle their bodies, or project yourself into their heads.
The camerawork might be shaky, the plot might have holes, the audience might not even know what the film is about, but if your actors are compelling you can still keep people in their seats. On the other hand, if a movie looks great but the acting stinks, that’s all that anyone’s going to notice. The unavoidable conclusion is that actors are the single most important element in a film. It’s certainly the conclusion that actors and their agents tend to draw.
Attracting, auditioning, and casting actors is not a science but an art, and keeping them happy is a black art. Still, it’s not hard to master, as long as you understand the fragility and the preciousness of the elements that you’re handling.
THE RULES OF THE GAME
First, though, you need to know the rules. The Screen Actors Guild exists in part because actors are so desperate to work that they could otherwise be easily exploited. As a consequence, SAG completely regulates what you can do with members of the union. If they’re not members of the union, you can do whatever you want (and pay them about a fourth of what they’d otherwise get), except you need a special agreement to mix SAG and non-SAG actors, and you won’t find many decent actors who aren’t in the guild. On films like Go Fish, in which Rose Troche used people from her neighborhood, or Kids, in which Larry Clark wanted teenagers who hung out in that grungy milieu, we didn’t need a SAG contract. And plenty of successful low-low-budget movies—Slackers, Clerks, The Brothers McMullen—are cast with the director’s friends (and often with the director): A tinge of amateurishness gives those films their realism and their distinctive tang. If you don’t have much money and you want to take the elements of your life and riff on them, then you probably know who you want for which parts anyway. (I recommend you audition everyone, though, even if you call the process something else, so that you know what you’re getting. Otherwise, you might have a nasty surprise when the equipment is rented and crew members are standing around, glaring.)
However exhilarating it is to discover and mold great natural actors, doing a non-SAG film and doing it well takes a tremendous amount of effort. Luckily, SAG has different contracts for different kinds of budgets. It also has an experimental or limited exhibition contract, which allows you to pay your actors substantially less than the basic, low-budget agreement—with the proviso that the film can only be shown in a handful of theaters or film festivals, and that the second it exceeds that number you have to renegotiate and come up with a lot more money. I had to do that on Poison and Swoon because the films got bigger distribution than we had contracted for.
That sounds like a no-lose situation: Pay as little as you can up front, and if the film hits big, you have more money from the distributor to upgrade. Except that sometimes, with your movie ready to open, an actor will hold you up by saying, “I’m not going to accept scale. I want triple scale.” Some distributors will actually be scared off if you owe your actors too much—they think they’re going to get stuck paying the upgrades. You’re expected to deliver a movie that can play anywhere. And if your film doesn’t prove successful in the wider marketplace, those upgrades could eat up all the money the distributor gives you. On Poison, I didn’t renegotiate until the movie was playing in theaters, after the distributor asked (following the NEA commotion) if it could put the movie into wider release. On the next film, Swoon, I renegotiated the second I had an inkling that a distributor was about to bite.
Shorts are a no-brainer; they’re unlikely to have a vast commercial life no matter how good they are. Otherwise, my feeling is that unless you really believe your movie will be shown in only a few venues, go with the basic low-budget SAG agreement and don’t mess around with limited exhibition. If you have commercial aspirations and are trying to pull a fast one (which many producers do), SAG will sniff you out right away. Poison and Swoon genuinely were made with limited exhibition in mind; they ended up hitting in a way we didn’t anticipate.
You can always call SAG to get their rule book, which is as thick as a Bible and much more zealously enforced. It’s a difficult read, but if you’re planning to produce films you should familiarize yourself with it. I’ve seen even the most experienced assistant directors clutching their rule books and ruminating aloud: “If we give them breakfast now, are we allowed to…”
The standard salary for SAG actors on low-budget films is scale plus ten percent. At the time of this writing that’s approximately $1800 a week. It makes things very simple; if an agent asks for more I say, “You know what? It’s a prestige movie and it’s scale plus ten for everybody. If your client won’t work for that, I understand, but it’s all we can pay on this film.” Often, if a name actor accepts that salary, his or her agent will ask me to make it confidential. I respect that. The agent doesn’t want it getting out, or else everyone will want to pay scale. (In a way, I’m lucky because my reputation is such that I rarely get into salary disputes.) Of course, sometimes I do pay more than scale—it depends on the actor and the film.
Some producers negotiate deferments if they don’t have the money going in, but I’m more likely to sweeten the deal with back-end participation—say, a percentage of the net profits for actors who are carrying the film (as Julianne Moore did in Safe). That says: “I know you’re working for less than you’re worth, but you’re part of the team and if the movie does well, we all do well. We’re all in it together.” It’s not always an option, though. Sometimes your financiers don’t allow it, or the points you have to play with are too small.
SAG also tells you how you get your out-of-town actors to the set—with a first-class plane ticket. That’s prohibitive on some films. You can make it clear to the actors going in that if they live out of town and want to be in the movie, they have to be “local hires.” This isn’t always the fairest way to do business, but if the role is juicy enough, an actor will decide to put him/herself up in another city to be in your movie.
The key thing on a low-budget, independent film is parity: You don’t treat one actor better than another. Well, okay, you do treat certain actors better than others, but in groups: You say, “These four are the genuine leads and will be treated the same. These two come next and they’ll be treated the same. Then these two…” Stick to that, because if you don’t, one actor might visit another’s apartment and find out it’s twice as big, and the next day you have a petulant actor and a screaming agent. Your actor can’t say, “My trailer isn’t as big as hers” if it’s exactly the same size (or if no one has a trailer to begin with).
Agents will push for as many perks as they can get, but it’s not always easy to discern if the actor actually gives a damn. On Velvet Goldmine, I approached Christian Bale, who plays the sad-sack reporter, Arthur, to ask if I could get a ride in his car to my apartment. He had only been on set for a couple of days, so I didn’t really know him, but he seemed nice enough. He didn’t take kindly to my request, though. “My contract,” he said curtly, “says I get an exclusive ride to and from the set.” It did, so that was that. When I started to turn away, he said, “Christine.” Big grin. “I’m kidding.” The thing is, you never know. Plenty of actors value their privacy when they come to the set in the morning and leave at night.
You always hear stories of, say, Bruce Willis having his gym flown to Vienna, or of stars insisting that you fly their hair and makeup people to far-flung locations. Sometimes you have showdowns over issues like that, and you just need to take a deep breath and stick to your convictions. On one of our movies, an actress had to fly halfway around the world. A first-class ticket was $7000.00, which we couldn’t afford, but business class—at half that—was doable. Actually, it was still a lot of money, but I’m not that hard-hearted: twenty hours in coach is a nightmare. So we got her a business-class ticket, and her agent called me the day before she was supposed to come and said, “We want you to know if she doesn’t have a first-class ticket, she’s not getting on the plane.”
I called the director and explained the situation, adding, “It would be a bad idea to allow this before she’s even here. We’re not that kind of movie; we don’t have that kind of money. I don’t think she’ll walk, but there’s always a chance that if I call her bluff, she will.” The director said, “If that’s how she is, I don’t want her.” So I called the agent back and said, “She’s not getting the first-class ticket. If she chooses not to get on the plane, please let me know so I can recast.”
She got on the plane. And she could not have been a nicer or more reasonable actress. My hunch is that her agent said to her—as agents are wont to do—“What?! They want you to fly business class?! Don’t they know who you are?!”—and worked her into a froth. “If you don’t take a stand on this, they’ll think they can walk all over you!” Hell, if you had the chance to fly first class, wouldn’t you push for it? But ultimately, I knew how badly she wanted the part. I would have been very surprised if she hadn’t showed.
CASTING PEARLS BEFORE SWINE
When we began making short films for my first production company, Apparatus, neither my colleagues nor I had any experience with actors. It never occurred to us to hire a casting director. We said, “We’ll do it ourselves!” So we called hundreds of people and told them each to prepare a monologue. That’s how they do it in acting schools, but for a film it was the dumbest idea in the world. Actors would come in and announce that they were about to do a scene from The Glass Menagerie, then spend the next ten minutes emoting like crazy. It went on and on; we wanted to slit our wrists. After that I learned to stick to the movie. Give them a scene to read and work with them on it.
Whenever possible, hire a casting director. A top-flight one will have an encyclopedic knowledge of talent and an inside track to the most important agents. The likelihood that such a person will take on your unfinanced, $250,000 film is slim, but it happens. One prominent firm I know reads about ten independent scripts a month and chooses maybe one to represent. Their fee is on a sliding scale, and they might take a point on the back end. If they choose to handle your script, they can make all the difference in your film being made: One well-known actor is enough to inspire some finance companies or distributors to take the plunge.
If you’re just starting out and your budget is minuscule, your casting director doesn’t have to be very experienced. At that level, you don’t necessarily need relationships with agents. On Kids, we wanted someone who could figure out a way to penetrate the New York street scene and get us pedigreed street teens. The casting director hired an assistant, Katie Roumel, who was young enough to be a part of that world—who could go into clubs with flyers and approach kids without scaring them off. We did the same thing on Velvet Goldmine for real English club-kids. If the film is set in a specific milieu, you need someone who isn’t afraid and who will be accepted. I try to send women out whenever possible because they’re less threatening—we’ve all heard stories about guys who use the old “I’d like to put you in my movie” line to get cozy with starstruck young things.
A great casting director not only helps a filmmaker get to an established actor, but also has a good eye for someone up and coming, as well as an instinct for putting together a performer and a role in a way that would never have occurred to you. I work with several; some work better with certain directors than others. The best, for my money, are the ones who have strong opinions of their own. You can always disregard their advice, but unless your director is easily threatened and simply wants a rubber stamp, it’s useful to have another firm point of view. Different casting directors have different styles. Susie Figgis in England likes to discover unknowns, such as Jaye Davison of The Crying Game. Others pride themselves on cultivating relationships with all the top agents, so that they have access to a vast pool of name actors.
No matter who’s casting, the first thing to do is put out a breakdown—an announcement that says what the film is and what kind of actors you need. There’s a breakdown service that’s called, appropriately enough, Breakdown Services, which is paid for by actors’ agents. You tell them what you want—say, a twelve-year-old blond girl, a sixty-year-old man, and a chorus of bald Japanese monks—and it goes out to agents on both coasts. Usually, each agency assigns one person to your film, and that agent matches the available parts against their list of clients. If your lead is an actor with, say, the William Morris Agency, that agency might be more inclined to get your script to its other clients. Agencies love it when they can point to a film and say, “That’s our package.” Call it family values.
You might also want to do an open call, which you can advertise in places such as Backstage, or your local paper, or with posters in areas you hope that natural (and inexpensive) actors will congregate. In Happiness we needed Russians, so we put up lots of flyers in Brighton Beach and took out ads in Russian papers. Whatever you do, make your open calls specific. For example, that you want to see Russian men and women in their thirties and that’s all.
All kinds of issues come up in casting, some of which border on exploitation. On Kids, Larry Clark wanted “local color.” He’d heard about a man with no legs who’d go from subway car to subway car on a skateboard, asking for money. To find the man, Larry dispatched Katie, who rode the IRT up and down Manhattan, stopping at every station, talking to other beggars, transit police, and people in token booths. Finally, she found a token-booth clerk who remembered the man and said she’d pass him a note.
The next day the man called; elated, Katie set up an appointment to have him read. This proved more arduous for him than was at first apparent. He had to take the F train to one of the deepest stations in the city—three long flights to the street. Then he had to heave himself up another three floors to our office. And after all that, Larry wasn’t thrilled with what he saw. He motioned Katie into the back and mouthed the words, “His nubs are too long.” The man’s legs, you see, extended almost to the knee. So Katie sent the poor man back down all those stairs and home.
The audition process, ideally, helps a director find out about his or her characters, just by virtue of seeing so many different people’s interpretations. You can hear the same scene read by seventy different actors and find seventy new things in it; you can also learn what comes through regardless of the actor. Even when an actor’s too “out there,” the director might say, “Wow, that’s a slant I hadn’t even thought of.” On Todd Solondz’s film, we auditioned an actress with a background in comedy and a somewhat tremulous persona. Todd was quite taken with her and brought her back two more times to see how she took direction. The rest of us were crossing our fingers that she’d turn out to be a passing fancy. We understood her appeal, but we also feared that, because she had so little real acting experience, she’d soak up too much of Todd’s time and energy on the set. Ultimately, he did choose someone else. But as a result of her audition, he saw something new in a character that he had written, a character that he thought he knew thoroughly.
I’m always amazed when a director doesn’t take advantage of the audition process and actually experiment with giving direction. First-time directors are the worst. The actor comes in, reads the scene, the director says, “Okay, thank you,” and the actor shuffles out. “What’d you think?” I ask. “Oh, he didn’t get it,” says the director, and I explode: “You didn’t direct him!” An actor’s not a mind-reader—you can’t always expect him or her to know just what you want and deliver it in one try. Some directors have an attitude that translates as: “Come in and do the job the way I want it, and if you can’t, leave.” A bad sign.
Actors like to be directed in auditions, especially if it’s a risky movie, where they know they’ll have to trust their director to lead them down the right path, to steer them clear of land mines. Since most of the films I produce are risky in one way or another, that’s a major consideration. Not every actor who ventures off the beaten track emerges unscathed. An actor playing gay—even if he or she is gay in life—might be profoundly uncomfortable and need a great deal of handling. It can’t be said too many times: Actors who feel protected will give you everything they have, often more than they think they have in them.
In auditions, some actors tense up. They’re reading something they’re not very familiar with for highly judgmental strangers. It’s hard to determine whether you’re seeing them at their best. Other actors will be sensational in the audition, you’ll hire them, and they’ll never be as good again. Part of a casting director’s job is to sense which actors are capable of giving you more, and which are likely to give you nothing but what you see. My favorite casting directors are the ones who’ll make a pitch for an actor who might need work, but who has some quality that—if you can get it onto the screen—will be unexpected and fresh.
It’s hard now to get big-name actors to read for you. Even not-so-big-name actors. Their agents want you to know that they’re above that sort of thing. “He’ll meet with the director, but he won’t read,” the agent will say, and you’ll say to yourself, “Who the hell is he?” Some directors cannot fathom casting actors without hearing them read. More and more you’re supposed to just offer a part to somebody. Or to arrange an “offer-pending” meeting, so that both the actor and the director can get out of the deal if they end up detesting each other.
An agent might also say, “He’ll read, but you can’t tape him,” which is really a drag for two reasons. Sometimes a quality will show up on screen that you don’t perceive in the room. The other reason is that if the director has seen fifteen actors that day, he or she will be burnt out, trying to pay attention but sick of hearing the same scene again and again. In those cases, it isn’t until later that he or she can look objectively at the tape of actor number fifteen and say, “Wow!”
Producers don’t have to be present for every audition, especially if they’re all being put on video. In fact, in some ways it’s better for a director to show me a tape and ask what I think because I’ll have a fresh perspective—I wasn’t stuck in the room for eight hours. I was present for the final auditions on Velvet Goldmine with Toni Collette and Christian Bale because Todd Haynes needed somebody to turn to afterwards and say, “Well, what do you think?” That was a happy case, because we both said, “Let’s cast them” as soon as they walked out the door.
Some directors like to have coffee with an actor, to keep things as casual as possible until the last moment. They’ll do everything they can to make an actor feel comfortable. And then there are the ones who try to create an atmosphere of anxiety. The poor actor enters the room and the director just sits there, staring at the résumé in silence. The actor doesn’t know what to say, what to do. The seconds crawl. I think this is incredibly counterproductive, not to mention inhuman. It’s a power play, and you have so much power when you’re auditioning actors anyway—you don’t need to torture them. Going to auditions must be the worst thing in the world for an actor. They’re coming from temp work or a job waiting tables; they give it their all before an unsmiling tribunal; and, as they leave, they can almost hear, “Nnnnah.”
It does get heartbreaking in casting, when you know how desperately an actor wants to do a part. Actors lobby hard for good roles. Or sometimes you think somebody’s cast and then, at the last minute, lightning strikes. When Todd Haynes was writing Safe and thinking about the protagonist, Carol, he had in mind an actress who had done a terrific job in Poison. We weren’t even auditioning anyone else. But we were having a hard time getting financed, and we knew that a bigger name would help, so we agreed to meet some other actresses. (“All right,” groused Todd, “I’ll see a couple of people. But I know who’s playing Carol.”)
Julianne Moore wasn’t exactly big-time then. She’d been Annabella Sciorra’s best friend in The Hand That Rocks the Cradle and the victim of the film’s most spectacular set-piece—she got cut to ribbons by a rain of greenhouse glass. Vanya on 42nd Street hadn’t opened yet. Julianne’s agent had said, “You absolutely, positively can’t tape her, and you can’t read her.” That made her prospects even dimmer. So she came in, we chatted for a few minutes, and that might have been that if Todd hadn’t said, “Can we read you?” and I hadn’t said, “Can we tape you?” She said, “Sure!” She didn’t mind being taped. She wanted to read.
And she gave the most astonishing reading. Time froze; the air in the room stopped circulating. Todd and I were both on the floor. What do you say? “Great! Thanks!” She left and we looked at each other and—“She’s cast! We’ve got to get her!” Julianne told me later that she wanted the part so badly that out in the hall she burst into tears.
Ironically, we took the tape to LA to show the coproducer and executive producer, and it was a total blur. I had some intern doing the taping and he couldn’t figure out the camera and was probably too scared to let me know. Sitting in LA, staring at the fuzz on the monitor, we could sort of hear Julianne and sort of see her shape. So it remains a mythical reading. She got the part, though. And, yes, it was hard on the other actress. But in the end, Todd will always, always do what’s best for the movie.
Every year, the financing even of small, independent films becomes more cast-driven. I wonder if we could get away with doing Kids without stars now. As it was, we had problems convincing the money people (not to mention one another) that we could pull the movie off with such inexperienced performers. The temptation to gussy it up was close to overwhelming.
In fact, Larry Clark almost didn’t use Chloe Sevigny, who ended up giving a wonderful performance as Jennie, the girl whose discovery that she has AIDS jumpstarts the plot. Out of fear that we didn’t have any real actors, the casting director was pushing another girl—someone on the rise, who looked more like a conventional ingenue. We gave that actress the part, even though we didn’t know how she’d fit in with the other kids. Meanwhile, Chloe was one of their posse—she had spent the last two summers hanging out with them in Washington Square Park.
We brought the actress to New York, and while Larry was working with her, her lawyer started acting like a jerk and holding up her contract. So Larry, who had a healthy respect for contracts, called me on the Sunday before the shoot and said, “I don’t want to cast her.” “Too late,” I said. “You did.” “She hasn’t signed the contract,” he said. “And now I want Chloe. She’s perfect. I don’t know why I didn’t see that before.”
Lauren Zalaznick (my coproducer) and I made him call the actress and give her the bad news himself, half-thinking that she’d talk him into using her, but five minutes later her lawyer was on the phone with me screaming: “You have no idea what you’re doing! She is represented by some very important people and this is going to have tremendous repercussions! What are you going to say when Mike Ovitz calls?” Well, Mike Ovitz never called, but I still felt bad about how it all went down. Nevertheless, Chloe was the right decision for the film. The other actress would have stuck out. Casting her was an attempt to play it safe, and it would have been a disaster.
It’s not an uncommon dilemma. Directors on these sorts of films usually feel they’re on the verge of having the bottom drop out of their budget, so when a financier says “You can’t have that actress, you have to have one of these,” they say, “Okay.” And once you open up that door, forget it. I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic to financiers. They have good reason to want recognizable actors. And if a star is right for the role—hey, it’s just as easy to love a rich man as it is a poor one. The problem is that so often these stars are so obviously wrong. Directors have to sit back and remember what got them to where they are and what really matters. If they can’t stand by their vision, they can’t expect anyone else to—including, ultimately, the audience.
As for getting bona fide stars, well—they can help get you financed, but they bring a lot of baggage with them. In the first place, your intimate ensemble piece is going to look lopsided with an actor who has a neon sign over his head saying, “Hi, I’m Dustin Hoffman.” Sometimes you see an indie film that’s filled with name actors doing cameos—saying two or three lines and leaving—and it feels inappropriate. The little movie can’t be seen for all the starshine. And I’ve heard about small films nearly wrecked by big-deal actors who think they’re doing the filmmaker a favor just by showing up.
The other concern, which is more practical, is that it’s unlikely that actors of stature are going to accept small-movie conditions. They might work for scale. They might say, “Sure, I just did a blockbuster, I’ll do your picture for twenty thousand.” Financially, they’re able to afford it. Psychologically, they might not be. It’s hard to give up the trappings of stardom. They’ll want an air-conditioned trailer, their parents flown in, an exercise bicycle on the set, a nanny for their kids, and housing for their multiple assistants. In the budget, you call these things “star costs.” They always mushroom, and they can throw your little movie into chaos. I’m not suggesting that if Sigourney Weaver wants to do your picture you should necessarily blow her off. But understand, you’ll be entering a different realm of moviemaking, and you’d better be prepared
You also have to be careful about raised expectations, which can injure more than your ego. When Nicole Kidman read Velvet Goldmine and expressed interest in working with Todd Haynes, everyone was ecstatic: Someone with her name would make a huge difference in financing, not to mention how the picture would be handled. So Todd met with her and had a very good meeting. It looked like it could happen. But then the movie Kidman was set to make with Tom Cruise and Stanley Kubrick went into production, and—with Kubrick’s reputation for going over schedule by, like, years—there was obviously no way she could take the part. (As of this writing, more than eight months after Velvet Goldmine has wrapped, the Kubrick film is still shooting.)
The problem was that her inability to do the movie created a lack, where before a lack hadn’t been perceived. Now it was the film that Nicole Kidman had dropped out of, and the financiers’ enthusiasm flagged. The same thing happened with Patricia Arquette on Todd Solondz’s movie. The distributor said the budget wasn’t cast-contingent, but when Arquette pulled out because of an illness in her family, the risk seemed suddenly higher, and the budget got slashed by a third.
It worries me, the way the money people meddle more and more with the casting of independent films. Distributors and financiers have forbidden me, in the last year, from hiring one very eager, very well-known actress because a few of her recent movies have tanked. True, her performances were not spectacular, but where were the directors? The fact is, she’s brilliant, and sooner or later she’s going to get a role that she hits out of the park. And then she’ll be back on top. Meanwhile, I don’t get to work with her and give her that opportunity. It will be someone else’s fortune.
Getting your script to Name Actor if you don’t have a well-connected casting director is tricky. Legends abound of screenplays thrown over fences or slipped under stalls in bathrooms. The latter, it is said, was used by the recipient in lieu of toilet paper. Better to find a connection, any connection. A hairdresser. A gardener. A housekeeper. A cousin of a friend of an assistant. Then you have to hope that the actor actually reads, which is not a given. But take heart: Unless they’re only in it for the money, you have something they want, which is a role that will stretch them, remind them why they became actors in the first place. Make it easy for them to say yes. They might not give you twelve weeks in Somalia, but ten days in New York or LA is pretty painless, even for a prima donna.
POP QUIZ: How do you sit across from a financier and say, “Name Actor is in my movie” when you haven’t got the money to make the movie yet?
(Remember: you must have Name Actor to get the money, but you don’t get Name Actor until you get the money.)
ANSWER: You lie.
There are so many nebulous areas in casting, so many white lies you have to tell. Agents, meanwhile, are trained to sniff them out, because they don’t want to waste their client’s time—they don’t want to be attaching their actors to your project if you’re not financed. So you tap dance: You tell Name Actor that you have the money and the money people that you have Name Actor and if one party doesn’t talk to the other it can all work out and you’ll get the movie made.
Hey, agents lie like mad themselves. Some will stop at nothing to get their clients cast. If they get wind you’re close to signing another actor, they’ll call you up and say, “You know, he’s a real pain in the ass on a set,” or “Have you seen all the weight she gained?” or “I hear he has a substance problem.” On one of my films, the choice for the lead came down to two actresses—it was very close—and both agents, on the same day, called the casting director to badmouth the other’s client. And they both said virtually the same things: She’s really demanding, no one likes to work with her, etc. An agent wants to be able to turn to his or her client and say, “It was a long battle, but I was finally able to get you the part!”
Of course, sometimes those agents are telling the truth, which is why I make calls to other producers, directors, and casting agents to get the inside story on actors I’m thinking of hiring. It’s reckless not to. If someone has the potential to wreak havoc on your set, you should be aware of that going in. But that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t hire an actor if he or she were otherwise ideal.
Sometimes your information isn’t accurate. Other times the actor in question just grows up. Before we cast Velvet Goldmine, I asked around about Toni Collette and heard that she was “a tad difficult.” I mention that now because she turned out to be one of the easiest, most selfless performers I’ve ever worked with. There were people in the movie who didn’t have her experience, and she guided them—sometimes literally. Once, when an untrained actor proved unable to hit his mark and blew take after take, she took his arm and gently, discreetly, and totally in character, planted him on the spot where he was supposed to be. She made nothing of it, but it was pure class.
Calling around will help you know what to expect, so you can take precautions. You can learn what kinds of things tend to set an actor off—but also what will make him or her a happy camper. As I’ve suggested, you can make allowances for bad behavior, as long as the actor is giving a good performance and shows up on time with his or her lines memorized. The fact is, there are Difficult Actors and Problem Actors. Almost all actors are Difficult Actors. If they have a legitimate reason to get mad, they’ll get really mad. If they’re upset about something, they’ll refuse to come to the set, forcing you to go to them. Their agents are all over you for small infractions. Live with it. Be happy that they’re not Problem Actors. The Problem Actor is the guy who’s genuinely disruptive on a daily basis—who doesn’t show up for work, or who shows up drunk or stoned.
Let’s be frank: people in the arts, especially performers, are prone to abusing chemicals. They tend to be anxious and vulnerable, given to “medicating” their moods; and they have irregular schedules, with periods of intense labor alternating with periods of complete idleness. Some manage not to let it affect their work. Even Robert Downey, Jr., with his much-publicized arrests for drunk driving and drug possession, could be relied upon to give brilliant performances. One well-known older actor is famous for coming to the set drunk and stoned, leaving drunk and stoned, and being drunk and stoned (and a pain in the ass) in between. But his acting remains amazing, so he still gets hired. I’m pretty nonjudgmental about these things. As long as actors get themselves to work, what they do when they leave is their own business. And people do clean up their acts. They go into rehab, join AA, and come out relatively okay—apart from the fact that they go around bending your ear about their sobriety.
On the set, however…
Kids posed the biggest challenge. What was hard about it—and what’s hard on any low-budget film that uses a vérité style—is maintaining a sort of controlled chaos. Lots of people think that the young actors in that movie were really drinking beer and smoking dope. I couldn’t control what they did when they left the set, but once they came onto it, my answer was and is: No drugs—legal or illegal. I can accept actors who have a drink or two before shooting a love scene to relax; as long as you monitor their intake, it’s probably okay. (Lots of people need a few drinks before having sex in real life—imagine the pressure with thirty people standing around.) Otherwise, drugs will mess your actor up, serve as a contagion for other actors and creative personnel, and give you a dangerous reputation for tolerance.
On one film I produced, an actor had a scene in which he was supposed to snort cocaine, which is usually glucose. He approached me and announced that he was allergic to glucose, so he had decided to snort the real thing on camera. I told him he could snort baking powder, because there was no way I’d let real cocaine on my set. He got so angry that I had to ask the director to take him aside. The director handled it well. “I don’t want you fucked up for real,” he said. “You have to act.” And the actor said, “Oh. Right. Act.”
Unfortunately, in minutes the rumor that he was really going to do coke was all over the set. Which made me furious, because that’s the kind of thing that follows a producer around. I’m still trying to shake off the scuttlebutt over Kids. Our last office was across from what turned out to be NAMBLA—the Man-Boy Love Association. I thought, all I need is a journalist to visit and write, “Christine Vachon, whose films feature kids having sex and whose actors are reputed to use drugs on her sets, has an office right across the hall from…”
WALKING ON EGGS (OR EGOS)
In real life, actors tend to be thinner-skinned than other human beings—which is part of the reason that on screen they’re so transparent. An actress with a reputation for being a horror once pointed out that if she’s working to make herself raw and exposed so that the camera can read her every twitch, and a light drops from the ceiling and nearly crushes her skull, she won’t respond with patience and forbearance. She’ll scream like a banshee.
Which isn’t to say that actors are always within reason. They will get fits of pique about things—the food, their trailers, personnel they don’t feel are treating them well. They make all kinds of crazy demands. And I don’t mean seemingly crazy or crazy-until-you-get-to-know-them. I mean nuts. But I get angry when I see interns or production assistants roll their eyes when an actor has sent back the tea because the water is tepid or the lemon has seeds. Because if that’s what they need to give a performance, then get them the damn hot tea with the damn seedless lemon slice. Get them whatever they need, as long as it’s legal. And if what they need is just to send you back and forth twenty times, then that’s what you have to do.
That said, I don’t like working with actors who are nasty to the “small” people on the set. Partly I don’t like it because they’re picking on someone whose fault it really isn’t. It’s not the mistake of some hapless passing production assistant that they don’t have any water in their trailer. It’s my fault, as producer. And it’s my job to soothe their injured egos and minister to their needs. Often, what’s most important to them is that the person at the top has bothered to come in and discuss the difficulty, even if the second- or third-in-command could handle it just as easily. In those cases, taking them aside and saying, “I understand you’re unhappy. Tell me what’s the matter” is all it takes: they haven’t just been handed off to anyone; attention by someone who matters has been paid.
On bigger films, a producer might be contractually obligated to provide an actor with an assistant. This will cost you money, but will make your job easier. Jonathan Rhys-Myers, the star of Velvet Goldmine, always needed to feel he was in a safe environment. He’s a terrific actor, and I’d work with him again in a second. But he was nineteen years old, playing a role that required him to leap onto chandeliers and kiss a man. It would have been rough going for a seasoned pro, and Jonny was a boy. He’d get upset with himself if he thought he’d done something wrong, even when the error was all in his head. His assistant made sure he was at the set on time and that he had what he required to relax and give a performance. Great actors are worth the extra effort. The one day Jonny thought he was a bit of a brat—it was no big deal, actually—he bought roses for the entire crew. He understood it was important to show respect for the people you work with. Not all actors do. He’s a really nice young man—I hope he stays that way.
On one of my movies, the donnybrook with actors was costumes. We had agreed to hire a costumer who was a friend of the director’s but who’d had little experience managing stars. On his own terms he was fine, but his own terms were the wrong terms. He couldn’t handle the fact that the actors were—are—terrified of the way they think they look: that they’re fat, that they’re old, that they’re wrinkly. It’s not so hard to understand. Actors make their fortunes on how they look. Often when I’m out to dinner with actresses, wolfing down my pasta and knocking back two or three glasses of wine, I’ll have a close-up view of what they go through: “Do you want some of that?” “Oh, I shouldn’t.” “Oh, I shouldn’t, either. Here, just a little.” “Oh, I’m so fat.” “No, you’re not fat.” “Oh, I so am! Oh, this diet…” We who aren’t performers can laugh about it, but we don’t have to do what they do—and be eternally judged.
If we’d gone with a costume designer who had known how to make them feel good about themselves, who had said, “Trust me. You look gorgeous,” then things would have probably turned out fine. What happened, though, was that one of the actresses insisted on picking her own outfits, and they weren’t very flattering. She felt she had no choice: she didn’t trust the costumer. These are the lessons you learn after it’s too late.
Men, of course, have their own issues. Stephen Dorff was nineteen when he put on lipstick and makeup and high heels to play the drag-queen Candy Darling in I Shot Andy Warhol. He was marvelous in the film, but he needed a lot of reassurance that the part was not going to have a disastrous impact on his future as a swaggering leading man. This is not an uncommon concern, especially in the kind of movies I make. In the same film, Jared Harris had to transform himself from a rugged English rugby-playing type into the slim, effeminate Warhol. I remember hearing stories about Longtime Companion, in which most of the actors playing gays were heterosexual. After “cut” was called, a lot of them immediately metamorphosed into ball-scratching, football-loving, woman-fondling guys. I’m sure it was a pain to be around that kind of behavior, but I don’t think less of them: They had agreed, after all, to play those parts. It’s hard for men to act effeminate on film sets, which tend to be testosterone-driven places.
Nine times out of ten, a crisis with an actor is vanity based. I’ve been on panels with a Hollywood producer who likes to pose the following problem. You’re making a movie with a big star. The director isn’t a first-timer but he doesn’t have any clout. After the first week of shooting, the star sees a cut of two scenes, calls you up, and announces, “I’m extremely unhappy with this director. Either he goes or I go.” The producer asks, “What do you do?”
In an audience of would-be producers, everybody says: Stand by your director. But it’s more complicated than that. Unless you agree that the director is doing a bad job, you have to be skillful enough to find out the real source of the grievance. Frequently, when actors are upset like that it’s because they’ve gone to dailies and they think that they look fat or old, or that they’re just not coming through on screen. You can’t expect them to be objective about their own images unless they’re very, very seasoned, and sometimes not even then. There’s even a case to be made for keeping your actors out of dailies at all costs. The punch line to the story above—which is true—is that the producer eased the star’s mind, the director was not fired, and the star went on to give a spellbinding performance, for which he won an Academy Award.
If you can’t keep actors out of dailies, for God’s sake don’t invite them back to watch a rough cut and solicit their opinions. They’ll say, “Don’t you think you should hold on me a little longer in that scene?” or “Where’s that thing I did that was really great? You know, that little bit of business. Oh, you have to put it back in!”
Tell them you’ll see them at the premiere.